Thirty Years On

David Langford
looks back at the splendours and miseries of Ansible. (Dateline:
late 2009.)

A minor anniversary was widely ignored in August 2009, chiefly because
I'd forgotten all about it. On 23 August 1979, Seacon '79 began –
the first Worldcon in Brighton – and I distributed
the first issue of Ansible.
Or maybe the real anniversary was the 20th of that month, when according
to the infallible list (still preserved in a grubby old ring-binder) I
ran off 250 copies on the mighty electric Roneo duplicator that
dominated my office in those days.

Can it really be thirty years? Not strictly, because there was an
embarrassing gap from 1987 to 1991. This had its origins in the hassle
of a lithographed print run that then ran to well over six hundred
copies, plus mild trauma (the
Soggy Scientologist
Incident) at the second Brighton Worldcon, and was fuelled
by my growing laziness into a veritable blaze of apathy. Even by 1987
the technology had changed, with a succession of Sperry-Remington and
IBM Selectric golfball typewriters giving way to a word processor for
Ansible 42 in
March 1985. As a foreshadowing of horrors to come, this MS-DOS "SuperWriter"
software wouldn't print in two columns and I found myself compelled to
spend hours and hours writing an add-on program that would achieve this.
Chris Priest and I then marketed it to the general public. "This
amazing package will enable you to, er, publish Ansible!"

For the comeback issue, Ansible
51 (October 1991), the rackety old daisywheel was replaced by a
laser printer and SuperWriter by WordPerfect 5.1 with an add-on font kit
from Bitstream. Technogeek friends are reliably convulsed with horror
and disbelief on learning that Ansible is still produced with
the identical software. But lots of other programs have joined the
fractal nightmare over the years, since – just for a start –
each new print edition needs to spawn the plain-text conversion for
email, CIX and Usenet, and HTML for the
website.

When I was bashing out Ansible with low-tech gear and
assembling it with an incredibly dangerous electric stapler known as
Fang, the eternal grumble was that production took up too much time. In
the modern, streamlined electronic era, I can confirm that Ansible
and its cyberspace spinoffs take up far too much time.

Cynical Langford-watchers may now be expecting a repeat of my
exposition "The Secret History of Ansible" (Science-Fiction
Five-Yearly 11), but I'll let you off with a footnote.
[1] The present article is more an awful
warning – delivered in croaking tones by the haggard, emaciated
victim – of the traditional fannish terrors of Creeping
Perfectionism and Bigger-And-Better Syndrome in the online arena.

It started with a couple of WordPerfect macros that have grown
increasingly labyrinthine over the decades: one called STROSS, hinting
at which cutting-edge technofan first asked for the plain text of each
Ansible to post on Usenet, and – just as soon as I'd been
offered some web space [2] – another
unoriginally called HTML, to churn out the web edition.
[3]

That would have been a good place to settle into a nice relaxed
routine, but the next illogical step was of course to add the first
series of Ansible (issues 1-50) to the website. The final nine
were easy, being already on disk and needing only laborious conversion.
Fan volunteers rekeyed the rest, and by September 1997 all the back
issues were flaunted online as plain text files. But, I nigglingly felt,
they weren't flaunted enough. In 1999, pausing only to write
some specialist software to speed the task (or, when you counted the
time taken to debug my home-made application, to slow it down
considerably), I bodged them all into proper HTML documents and hastily
scanned the artwork. [4] Late in 2008,
realizing that the 1999 software used to reduce the images to a suitable
size was really rather crap – too many jaggy and faded-out lines
– I redid it all with my newest scanner and favourite
image-tweaking program. [5]

Other archive projects came remorselessly to mind, like Jorge Luis
Borges's mesmerizing concepts that you can't not think about. For
example, I often consulted and quoted Peter Roberts's 1970s UK fan
newsletter Checkpoint. This was the onlie begetter of Ansible:
Peter decided in 1979 that 100 issues were quite enough, firmly handed
me his subscription list and conveyed that UK fannish newsmongering was
now my problem. Eventually it seemed a good idea to put Checkpoint
online, and fan volunteers were again summoned. Special credit here goes
to Peter Sullivan, who personally dealt with 36 and a bit issues. I
obsessively formatted and tidied the results, and by 2007 there was a
complete, searchable Checkpoint archive. [6]
Gosh wow.

I am grateful, ever so grateful, that others stepped in to deal with
even older British fan newsletters, and spared me the possibility of a
further hideous time-sink. Greg Pickersgill masterminded the archive
project for Ron Bennett's "really quite legendary newszine"
Skyrack (1959-1971) [7] and Rob Hansen
dealt single-handed with J. Michael Rosenblum's Futurian War Digest
(1940-1945). [8] When I contemplate all the
heroic work expended on these fanhistorical resources, and the perhaps
as many as a dozen fans who seem even vaguely interested in the results,
I can get quite ironic. Or maybe I'm just channelling Greg there.

One damned archive leads to another. In my copious spare time, or
rather to avoid the possibility of having spare time, I made up a
website for my and Kevin Smith's Drilkjis, now to mention my own
Twll-Ddu and Cloud Chamber. [9]
When Abigail Frost died in 2009, the idea of putting a few of her better
fan articles online (conceived mainly to cheer up a desolated Roz
Kaveney) grew unexpectedly as fans far and wide sent scans, to become a
quite extensive Abi Archive in its own right. [10]

Then there are the smartarse PHP scripts on the Ansible site
that automatically serve up the latest issue, or provide a random dip
into Thog's Masterclass, an SF Quote of the Moment, or a slide-show of
masthead cartoons from 1979 to the present day ... and grandiose schemes
like indexing all the Ansible convention coverage (and then Checkpoint's,
and then Skyrack's) ... or the truly remarkable notion which
this margin is too small to contain ... [11]
Then, of course, we have the recurring joy of routine site updates.
According to the upload logs – which I never thought to subject to
counting software until just now – the main Ansible page
with the links and British Isles convention listing has in the last year
been updated exactly 400 times. Gulp.

The Plain People of Fandom: Why not delegate the routine work
to more hapless volunteers?

Myself: Argh! Anathema! A control freak never delegates!

Actually I wouldn't mind some help with updates to the overseas
convention list [12], which was guiltily
instituted because Bridget Wilkinson still hasn't managed to revive her
Fans Across the World newsletter. The chore of
maintaining this page
pulsates with desperate fun as you visit and revisit old con websites
that variously conceal the date, obfuscate the venue, blot out all
useful information in a welter of blog posts about minor local events,
or become superseded with no indication of this fact and no link to the
new site. (Special Thog marks go to the US "Convivial", whose
third instance in 2008 had its website in subdirectory /convivial3,
leading me to miss the 2009 event altogether because I was checking for
/convivial4 and they'd put it in /convivial. Foolish Earthling, your
puny terrestrial "logic" is of no avail!)

If only I could focus my Cosmic Mind and get back to simply publishing
a fanzine ... Meanwhile, cheer up my hearties, and let's drink to thirty
years of madness.

The Footnotes

[2] The long-standing University of Glasgow addresses
dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-Archives/Ansible and dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible don't
exist any more, though there are depressingly many bad links to both
Out There. While these were still active I started a mirror site in my
own web space [3], which turned out to be just as well when the Curse
of Robert Stanek struck: http://news.ansible.uk/a219.html